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Question about WAR

im starting to understand sabermetrics a little better than what i used too. But one question i have is when they are talking about WAR how do they determine who the replacement player is. For example, Andrew McCutchen, he had a 7.0 WAR this season, now how do they determine who is replacement is? The back up CF on the Pirates?

^ Then you look at the career saber stat leaders and they are headed by a bunch of HOF'ers to give that saber stat some real to the game, substance.

What I am loving about WAR is that it is very endless.

You can rank by so many different kinds of WAR

Baseball-Reference WAR (rWAR or bWAR)
Fangraphs WAR (fWAR)
WARP (Baseball-Prospectus)
WPA (Win Probability Added, both Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference provide different calculations for this)
JAWS (Jaffe War System, used for Hall of Fame analysis)
Jpos (Jaffe but with Positional Adjustment)
Bill James has his own Hall of Fame WAR metric
And my own Net Runs Created (totaling Fangraphs RC, DRS, Positional Adjustment, and Base Running Value)
Standard Win Curve Analysis

The fact that there are so many options to measure snap-shot values tells you how strong the valuation has come, and how different people can interpret value subjectively.

Some fans seem to think this diminishes the value of WAR (how can WAR be any good when it isn't universally agreed upon?). I feel the complete opposite. I think this shows the strength of it. That it was conceived upon, and has been consistently improved upon and re-worked by others looking to get closer to accurate. It will only continue to get better. Which is so fantastic.